KYIV AS TOURISTIC DESTINATION: CURRENT CHALLENGES

Main Article Content

Olga RADCHENKO

Abstract

Introduction. City of Kyiv, with its rich natural and cultural-historic recourses, extensive hotel facilities and transportation accessibility, traditionally attracted significant inflow of tourists. But following mass political protests of 2013–2014 and military actions in Crimea and in the East of the country the number of visitors had dramatically decreased. Respectively, it negatively affected functioning of tourist business.  Only in 2016–2018 flows of tourists were partially restored. But the plans of City Administration to have 6 mln. tourists as minimum in 2021 with fiscal revenues of up to 1 bln. hryvnas to the City budget turned unreachable due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even before the pandemic the share of tourism in Gross Regional Product of the city was pitiful with 0,5%.


Kyiv has 182 facilities for collective accommodation, including 133 hotels, with average load even before the pandemic of 25–30%. Tourist services are provided by 2500 businesses, which makes 24% of all tourism-related companies in Ukraine. The number of people, employed in the tourist branch during the last years was at the level of 26 thousand. While almost one third of visitors before 2013 came from Russian Federation, now prevailing number of visitors come from countries of Western and Easter Europe, USA and Israel. 


The purpose of the article is analysis of situation with tourism in Kyiv as well as efforts of city administration to cope with today’s challenges, particularly global digitalization of tourist branch and COVID-19 pandemic


Results. The article defines certain social-economic and ecological problems of systematic character which negatively affect tourism, particularly unsatisfactory state of public transport, the lowest in the Eastern Europe per capita levels of Gross Regional Product and foreign investments, high level of air pollution. At the same time the programmes of tourism development, elaborated by City Administration, are making accent on promotion and introduction of certain elements of “SMART-destination”, leaving state of tourist infrastructure without proper attention. Mobile application «Kyiv Mobile Guide» and a tourist ID-card for city guests were launched, as well as City tourist website  kyivcitytravel.com.ua and official pages in social networks (YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter).


Originality. The article is the first one in the scholar research on current state of tourism in Kyiv. It also states, that insufficient attention is given to internal and regional tourism, while it can be quite instrumental for improving the situation on the market of tourist services.  


Conclusion. In our opinion, taking Kyiv’s tourism out of stagnation on a qualitatively new level needs, from one side,  deep study of international experience, from the other side – radical improvement in transportation, security and environment. Existing cultural and historic monuments cannot increase inflows of tourists by themselves. They are just parts of tourist attractiveness of the city. Moreover, large-scale promotional campaigns, while being necessary, also can not ensure stable arrivals of tourists in long perspective without the basic conditions, mentioned above. Besides that, in conditions of uncertainty, related to the pandemic, it is necessary to concentrate efforts on internal tourism with observance of all anti-epidemic measures.  

Article Details

Section
Статті
Author Biography

Olga RADCHENKO, Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy

PhD, Associate Professor

Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University

of Cherkasy, Cherkasy, Ukraine

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